A central theme that emerges from the twentypapers/posters/workshops in this conference is the complexity and deeply felt nature of debates around, perceptions about, and meanings of the reproductive body in the past and today. Speakers show how the discourse of the reproductive body is shaped by absences, silences, suppression, tensions, contradictions, misconceptions and mis-representation, invisibility, shame, fear, even violence
– the violent destruction of the tampon machines in the women’s bathrooms during the attack on the Capitol in Washingon DC in 2021 being a case in point (Shaprio).

Examples from the past are examined for their legacy: the perceived health benefits of ‘semen retention’ in the 1920s anticipates debates about men’s health today (Grainger), while the shame still experienced by
(non-celebrity) pregnant women in the workplace is traced back to the ways in which working-class women’s pregnant bodies were concealed through dress in the early twentieth century (McCormick). The archive (in this case of antenatal
messaging), meanwhile, becomes a ‘safe space’ to discuss navigation of risk in maternal decision-making in a public engagement project (Errington).

Several papers explore how the visual arts and literature reveal otherwise suppressed experiences of miscarriage and still-birth through, for instance, the work of Frida Kalo and Anais Nin (Cray), and how the art of
Helen Chadwick has produced real change in perceptions of and attitudes toward the reproductive body (Nevin). Science, in the form of mouse embryos in a mechanical womb on social media, is interrogated, alongside the medicalised discourse of menstruation suppression (Rodriguez-Muguruza) while the control of
pregnancy and birth through mechanical grids is reconceptualised through examples from 1960/70s film, art and photography (Jones).

Abortion is examined through multiple lenses including public health and human rights (Tongue), Modernist aesthetics, as a complex site of intersecting emotions (Elliott), and in the deliberations of The Abortion Book
Club (Strong and Nandagiri). The role of commerce appears in a paper on Marie Stopes’s
branded ‘Prorace’ cervical cap (Heidom), while the agony aunt as a disseminator of advice about sex, albeit in coded language, is examined in another (Hackney).

The reproductive body as a site of resistance and re-imagining is a theme that runs through all the papers but in different
contexts, for instance in relation to female ageing (Haywood), nationalization (Busquets), how attention to the bodily substances of labour (blood, placenta, fetal matter) can productively reframe what it means to give birth (Horn), or how
asexual reproductive modes offer affirmative opportunities for queer communities in feminist speculative fiction (Le Butt).